18 April 2023
Three A Level Computer Science students from Abingdon attended the 2023 Student Robotics competition weekend, held at the University of Southampton during the Easter holidays. This was the culmination of 5 months work by a larger team at School. Competing against 30 other schools, each of the teams were provided with a Robot ‘brain’ by organisers ‘Student Robotics’ and then challenged to design, build, programme and test a robot which would collect and transport cubes.
The team found day one challenging as they came to terms with the activity of robots from the other schools in the arena. However, after analysing video taken of the other teams, and adapting the coding of their own robot, Abingdon developed a successful counter strategy which resulted in a significant and impressive improvement on day two, resulting in our team coming second overall.
Peter Willis, Head of Computer Science, who accompanied the students, said: “This is only the second year we have participated in this prestigious competition which provides a fantastic engineering experience for A Level students. Last year, Abingdon took the ‘rookie prize’ so we were extremely gratified to have come second overall this year. I am very proud of our students who demonstrated their skill in engineering, their adaptivity and excellent teamwork.”
